Jeanne van Heeswijk

Jeanne van Heeswijk works with public spaces on socially committed art
projects, where she sees herself as mediator, communicator, in-between.
She creates 'interspaces' - always different connections, relations,
contexts between people, institutions, concepts. She uses 'urban
curating' for these interventions.

With her work Van Heeswijk stimulates and develops cultural production and creates new public spaces and meeting zones as well as remodels existing ones. To achieve this, she often works closely with artists, designers, architects, software developers, governments and citizens. Her projects for public spaces have included Valley Vibes, a “vibe detector” that assisted Chora in mapping East London; De Strip, a lively cultural zone within an empty former shopping area in Vlaardingen; Face Your World, an interactive computer game that makes kids look critically at their own environment (together with architect Dennis Kaspori); and The Blue House, a cultural refuge that intervenes in the history of a community on a newly built housing Island.

She regularly lectures on topics such as urban renewal, participation and cultural production. Her work has been widely exhibited in various venues such as Witte de With in Rotterdam; PS1 Center for Contemporary Art in New York; the Tokyo City Opera Art Gallery; Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam; the Taipei Biennal; Kunsthallen Brandts in Odense, Denmark; and the Busan Biennale in Busan, Korea. In 2003, Van Heeswijk was one of the artists whose work was included in the Dutch pavilion at the Venice Biennale. She has been awarded the Europrix, Chabot and Mama Cash prizes for her work.

For the 2007 publication of V2_'s Interact or Die!, she contributed with Empathy as a Radical Act: An Argument for Re-Scripting the City.

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Two years after the start of The Patching Zone, founder Anne Nigten decided that it is time for an overview of the organization and all its projects so far. This resulted in the book ‘Real Projects for Real People, volume 1’, that will be ...

Three presentations in the context of the IFFR 2003, three different ways to experience the city with these interactive projects by Jeanne van Heeswijk (NL), Matt Adams (UK), and Sascha Kempe and Michael Wolf (BRD).

"Interact or Die!" contains a series of interviews with leading biologists in the field of evolutionary developmental biology (“evo-devo”), with architects and art historians in the field of bioconstructivism.